I am very happy to announce that TechBubble Technologies have made it through to the semi finals of the IBM/4YFN Global Mobile Innovators Tournament with a project I created for the Smart Homes category of the tournament. This month I will be representing TechBubble Technologies at one of the demo days at B. in Amsterdam. I will be pitching the project in person to the judges to compete for a place in the final. If successful TechBubble Technologies will be going to the 2016 4YFN Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona to compete for winning project.

The project that was entered is an Android application that manages a new version of the JumpWay IoT gateway and TechBubble IoT devices. The gateway and devices were rebuilt integrating IBM IoT Foundation and Bluemix API's, along with custom API's provided by KPN for the tournament.

The JumpWay is a Raspberry PI that acts as a gateway for IoT devices. For this competition I have integrated IoT Foundation connectivity into the gateway. Once the device starts up the IoT application program sends a request to Bluemix to update the settings so that connecting applications know that it is online, this application also reads any data sent from other devices on the network and sends it to the IoT Foundation so that it can be consumed by other applications.

A 2nd program on the device reads data from the sensors which include light, proximity, sound, temperature and humidity. The program then publishes this data to the IoT Foundation allowing other applications to know what is going on with the device.

You can check out the Android application in the YouTube video. This application uses the IoT Foundation API and also Android Paho library to read data from the Raspberry Pi. You can monitor the sensors on the device in realtime as well as update the sensor thresholds and view graphs of the historical data stored in IoT Foundation. The JumpWay also has an CCTV camera which can be viewed whilst the device is online via the Android app.

There is one more app involved that is a Node JS application that connects to IoT Foundation and sends text messages using the KPN SMS API when it detects data above thresholds. The applications help monitoring home and office security easy. Additional devices can be added and the programs will allow users to manage them in the same way that they RPI can be managed.

I am really looking forward to the trip to Amsterdam this month and hope that we are successful in getting through to the finals of the tournament. If you are going to the event this month make sure to say hi.